LiNHS Concept Day - Software Repositories

We agreed that there should be a tiered NHS Repository approach which is free and available, and also available via an external mirror site.

The tiering should be

1. Local Repository visible at the end user desktop
2. Local Repository backfilled from NHS Repository on the NHS intranet, mirrored on an internet site
   
3. NHS Repository backfilled from Ubuntu repository, and other suppliers' repositories

LiNHS Concept Day - Software choices - General Applications

Office Productivity Suite
We felt that OpenOffice was the logical choice for an office productivity suite, as this provides best document compatibility with the current NHS preferred product (Microsoft Office 2007/2003).

Calendar/Scheduling/Resourcing/Messaging (e-mail, instant messaging, SMS, etc)
Evolution and Empathy are pre-installed on Ubuntu.

Reporting
It was felt that an application to directly connect to data warehouses would be useful, in the mould of Crystal Reports. We initially opted for JasperReports. This is a powerful open source Java reporting tool that has the ability to deliver rich content onto the screen, to the printer or into PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV, XML and even flash (swf) files. It is entirely written in Java and can be used in a variety of Java enabled applications, including J2EE or Web applications, to generate dynamic content. Its main purpose is to help creating page oriented, ready to print documents in a simple and flexible manner.

Project Management
Planner provides project planning and scheduling together with resource management.
http://live.gnome.org/Planner and available via the Ubuntu Software Centre



Image manipulation
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It is also available via the Ubuntu Software Centre.



Terminal Software
Built into Ubuntu



File Transfer, archiving and recovery
Use Nautilus, which is built into Ubuntu.

Web Browser
Firefox , which is built into the current distribution of Ubuntu.

LiNHS Concept Day - Initial decisions

LiNHS Mission Statement

The provision of healthcare should be supported by infrastructure which is

• secure
• stable
• efficient
• effective
• easy to use
• flexible, to meet the needs of evolving services

Based on this, we initiated the LiNHS project.

Partition size - 16GB initially
for ruggedised laptops, solid drives and bootable USB memory sticks there will be a cost step, hence the decision to initially start with a 16GB partition with the hope that we can keep this down to 8GB in the final build.

Virtual Machine
To ease development and use of Configuration Management principles, we decided to build the image within a SUN Virtualbox.

Linux Distribution selection
We considered various Linux distributions and opted for Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx). This was because of its generally accepted good user experience, and 10.4 is the latest Long Term Support version, which means 3 years support on Ubuntu Desktop (April 2015), and 5 years on Ubuntu Server (April 2017). A new LTS version is usually released every 2 years. 32 bit and 64 bit versions of this distro are available.

Software Choices
Building on research prior to the Concept Day:
http://www.kynson.org.uk/penguin/healthcare.htm
We considered the software options for each software requirement.

Tools : Open Smart Card Development Platform

The Open Smart Card Development Platform (OpenSCDP) is a collection of tools for the development, test and deployment of smart card applications. It uses the capabilities of Global Platform Scripting, Profile and Messaging technology to provide unparalleled flexibility and development speed.

(read more)

Tools : GNUMed.org

GNUmed Project

The GNUmed project builds an open source Electronic Medical Record. It is developed by a handful of medical doctors and programmers from all over the world. It can be useful to anyone documenting the health of patients, including but not limited to doctors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, ...

(read more)

Tools : Aeskulap - DICOM Viewer

Aeskulap is a medical image viewer.

It is able to load a series of special images stored in the DICOM format for review. Additionally Aeskulap is able to query and fetch DICOM images from archive nodes (also called PACS) over the network.

The goal of this project is to create a full open source replacement for commercially available DICOM viewers.

(read more)

News : Android comes with a kill-switch, 16 October 2008

Google has put itself in charge of policing Android devices. The search giant is retaining the right to delete applications from Android handsets on a whim.

(read more)